The 20-Inch-by-24-Inch Polaroid Camera

Chuck Close comments on the end of the 20-inch-by-24-inch Polaroid camera:

Like other artists he knows who have used the camera, he said, its attraction is not just in its size and endearingly oddball personality, like a creature from an obsessive hobbyist’s garage. The immediacy of making the picture, Mr. Close said, changes the relationship between the subject and the artist, who together witness the image come into being after the photograph is pulled from the camera and the chemicals perform their function. “You both work together to get something that you want out of it. Your subject knows what you’re trying to do.” (He described a 2012 session with President Obama in a hotel room so tiny that the camera and Mr. Close’s wheelchair — a spinal-artery collapse more than two decades ago left him partially paralyzed — crowded out the Secret Service.)

It’s too bad these cameras are going away.

Many artists crave analogue tools to create their work. Clicking a button on a digital device removes creative resistance from the act of creation.

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Materials

Obsessive Quentin

LOS ANGELES — When Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is released in a special roadshow version (with overture, intermission and additional footage) on Dec. 25, it will represent a feat worthy of the heist in the director’s “Jackie Brown.”

The film is scheduled to open on 96 screens in the United States and four in Canada, all in 70-millimeter projection, a premium format associated with extravaganzas of the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet from a theatrical standpoint, the technology is nearly obsolete. Last year, “Interstellar” opened in 70 millimeter at only 11 comparable locations. There were only 16 in 2012 for “The Master,” which renewed interested in the format. No film has opened with 100 70-millimeter prints since 1992. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, 97 percent of the 40,000 screens in the United States now use digital projection.

Over a period of a year and a half, the Weinstein Company, which will distribute the film, arranged for old projectors to be procured, purchased and refurbished and new lenses to be made for theaters.

NYTimes: Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Resurrects Nearly Obsolete Technology

Tarantino is so obsessive. I love it.

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Film

Find the Women

After discovering four sets of slide film transparencies sitting in a box of old vintage photographs at a local thrift store, Richmond, Va.-based photographer Meagan Abell is on a mission to find the original photographer and mysterious subjects. Fascinated by the medium format slides, which she guessed were taken in the ‘40s or ‘50s, Abell took them home.

via vintage everyday

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Image

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The Brown Sisters

The NYTimes has a great article on the 40 years of portraits Nicholas Nixon took of his wife and her 3 sisters:

Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.

From 1996-1998 I worked at the Zabriskie Gallery on 57th Street & Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Nicholas Nixon was one of the photographers Virginia Zabriskie represented. I was lucky enough to put on white gloves and thumb through many of the photos mentioned in this article.

Nixon used 8×10-inch film to make 8×10-inch prints, so the details in them were hyper-real. When your film is that big, it doesn’t come in a roll and you can’t fire off a lot of shots (easily). You have to know your shot and have the confidence to shoot it. Nixon is one of those old school photographers who can do it.

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Photography